The well-known SOA life cycle defined in a service modeling methodology like SOMA (also referred to herein simply as “life cycle” or “SOA life cycle”) may include the following phases: service identification, service specification, service realization, service implementation, and service deployment. The service identification phase includes identifying services using top down, bottom up, meet in the middle, and/or goal service modeling approaches. The service specification phase includes identifying service dependencies, service compositions, service messages and quality of service. The service realization and service implementation phases include an analysis of technical feasibility and the construction and generation of program code. The service deployment phase defines the actual service provisioning process.
The service specification phase is an especially crucial aspect of the aforementioned SOA life cycle because this phase includes designing service interfaces that are eventually exposed to external consumers and that enable the integration of software applications. The known service modeling methods like SOMA specify legacy interfaces and accounting data models and packages during the service specification phase, but these specifications are insufficient for a service designer to develop a robust service interface. Further, the service specification phase of the known SOA life cycle defined in a service modeling methodology like SOMA fails to account for data level details needed for middleware based integration environments, thereby leading to costly and complex service modeling techniques and poorly designed (i.e., non-robust) service interfaces. Thus, there exists a need to overcome at least one of the preceding deficiencies and limitations of the related art.